


Inheritance

by nookienostradamus



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Anal Sex, Fingering, M/M, Oral Sex, Reconciliation, deep thoughts, mild Dom/Sub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:47:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22578832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nookienostradamus/pseuds/nookienostradamus
Summary: This is the unrolled version of the Leo/Markus thread from Twitter. Complete as of Feb. 2020.
Relationships: Leo Manfred/Markus
Comments: 27
Kudos: 75





	Inheritance

Carl had been a small man—slight, and increasingly frail as his illness progressed. But his presence had filled the huge house and made it seem almost...cozy.

He's gone now, and along with him the bed and the softly pinging machines. Only the enormous paintings remain. 

Markus wants to draw from them the same comfort as he used to, but their animating force has fled. They preside over each room, grave and silent. Carl's studio, cluttered with works forever unfinished, seems so empty that the space howls. It used to feel airy, a place to be free. Now, it has turned huge and full of cold light as Detroit trembles into a tentative spring.

The studio's French doors remain shut. 

Markus is torn between a desperation to preserve the paintings and the urge to sell them all off. 

Noises outside the house are amplified; they ring in the corners that Carl used to fill. Birdsong puts Markus on edge. The sound of tires through late-season slush is enough to jar him from stasis. An ambulance's wail would be unbearable. 

He returned from Jericho under the pretense of "settling the estate." North and Josh and the others are overseeing the integration of the former rebels into regular human society.

Meanwhile, Markus sits like a lord in exile, denying that it's self-imposed. He hasn't called Carl's cadre of lawyers, or answered the deluge of messages from private dealers and museums. Mostly, he sits in the study—a room virtually abandoned by Carl during his last years because his chair didn't fit underneath the antique desk. 

Markus sits at the desk and traces over and over its intricate scrollwork. Sometimes he taps the place on his temple where the LED was embedded. And he stares at the unopened envelope that bears his name in Carl's shaky handwriting.

 _Thinking_.

 _Avoiding thought_. 

He's in the study when a vaguely familiar sound floats up from the ground floor. His processors aren't slow, just occupied. It's the front doorbell.

Jolted from his reverie, Markus heads downstairs, his eyes focused ahead and not on the paintings he passes. 

Leo stands on the stoop, shifting from foot to foot and rubbing his bare hands together. Leo—Carl's biological, human child. 

The one Markus still tries not to think of as the "real" son.

Yesterday was almost warm, but today is cold and gray, the sky riven with sleet. 

"Come in," Markus says to him, opening the door wide. They'd last seen each other at Carl's memorial. Leo had offered apologies and Markus had accepted, instead of either of them searching for a connection in grief.

It might be that way for a while. Maybe forever.

"Whew!" Leo says, hugging himself. His breath is a plume of fog on the air. _Inside_.

"Oh... _heat_ ," Markus says. "I forgot. Let me put it on."

"Thanks," Leo says, jamming his hands into his pockets. He's wearing his signature knit beanie. 

As he walks to the customizable thermostat, Markus thinks that Leo is looking healthier. He's still rangy from his junkie days, but his cheeks have filled out a little, the skin pink rather than ashy. The hair visible around his cap looks thicker, albeit threaded with gray. Come to think of it, Markus couldn't even detect any tobacco particulates on his breath.

The heating system chugs to life, smelling of warm dust, and Leo sighs into the sound, closing his eyes briefly.

For a reason he can't explain, Markus watches his pale throat. Something shimmers below the point of Leo's jaw, on the left. Melting sleet? No...a scar. Short but wide, very close to the carotid.

"You don't have to keep it like he—like Dad—did," Leo says. There's another apology in his eyes. "He didn't care about bills."

Markus almost tells him that the elderly often feel cold more acutely because of diminished body fat, but that would make him sound like the robot Leo probably still thinks he is.

Anyway, it's an ugly reminder. Carl had shrunk down to a shadow before his death.

"Money wasn't really an issue to...your dad," he says instead. It _still_ isn't. The legacy of Carl Manfred is worth a fortune.

Markus pictures the unopened envelope. What's inside will complicate everything, so it remains sealed, the lawyers still at arm's length. 

Leo is the unknown quantity. He could tie up the estate in court, asking for more money or executive power.

But no, Leo isn't the only unknown variable. Markus will accept whatever decision is handed down in the letter, but he cannot claim that some possibilities won't hurt. Full disenfranchisement, however unlikely, will wound him more deeply and permanently than almost anything. The threat of annihilation, the struggles of integration to come. The loss of Simon.

Oh... _Simon_.

But to be pushed away by the man who'd called him "son..." 

In any case, whatever happens is likely to shred the tentative truce he and Leo have drawn.

"I have coffee," he tells Leo. "But not food." He adds, "Sorry."

"Yeah, coffee sounds good," says Leo.

This is okay, this is what Markus is used to. Mindless domesticity. In the kitchen, he grinds the beans (cold to the touch), sets the induction kettle, slips the reusable filter into the wide mouth of the old-fashioned pour-over coffee maker. Warm air blooms from the floor registers and sends the smell of brewing coffee billowing. 

"Dad always has the good stuff," Leo says. He laughs into his fist, self-conscious. "I sound like an addict."

"You stopped smoking," Markus says.

"Stupid habit," says Leo. "Even with the CleanCigs."

"You _don't_ sound like an addict."

Leo sits back. 

"I do," Leo says. "Because I am one. Once an addict, always an addict. That sounds like a line, and it is—straight out of the book. All the times before, when I tried to get clean, I thought it was bullshit. But once you sit with it for a little while, it makes sense." 

Markus nods. He can pour coffee into mugs and not speak. That's easy enough.

"It's in your bones, kind of," Leo says. "In your blood. You actually have to build around it like you know it's always going to be there." He rests his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor. "I just don't want to be dependent on something, you know?"

There are layers of meaning to the sentiment that Markus can easily pick apart. Drug abuse recovery, he muses, is straightforward compared to a social movement. More traceable, less jagged.

His shoulders feel heavy. He sets the steaming mug down. "Routine," he says.

Leo looks up.

Markus shrugs. "Once an android, always an android."

Leo's eyes go wide; he's searching for permission.

Markus will remember that look later. For now, he smiles.

Then they both start laughing. 

After a while, Markus joins him at the table. It must seem strange to Leo to be watched in silence. Without realizing it, Markus had slipped briefly back into a familiar routine. Silence between him and Carl was always companionable. Near the end, sometimes speaking was painful. Carl's pain was literal, physical, and no agony on Markus's part would drive him to ask for conversation just to assuage his fear.

Leo _wants_ to talk; Markus sees it in the drumming of his restless fingers, the constant adjusting of his hat. He isn't Carl, though he has his father's nose and brow. Like Carl, Leo's mouth turns down slightly at the corners, which makes his smile a surprise, a transformation.

It's that mouth—Leo's—that has made Markus unable to despise him completely. It softens his face enough that he falls short of looking thuggish. Even when he scowled and pouted, his lower lip always trembled ever so slightly. Months ago, Markus had written it off as an effect of the drugs, or of withdrawal.

But here is Leo, clean and healthy, his mouth still trembling like he's on the verge of betraying his own actions with a word. Maybe it's a request for help. Maybe it always was.

Leo presses the lip of the coffee cup against his mouth, self-conscious. "'S'good," he says. 

"I haven't called the lawyers," Markus blurts out.

After a confused pause, Leo says, "Okay." He stares, as if trying to suss out whether Markus wants _him_ to make the call. To take over. That would be a relief from the burden. But it could mean leaving the house. 

It could mean leaving Carl.

Leo clears his throat. "I'm almost at 30 days in the sober living house. Thought I might free up a bed." He clears his throat again. "Stay here."

"Of course," Markus says, balancing on the edge of dread.

"I wouldn't ask you to leave," says Leo. "This place is huge. And, um, you were there for Dad—you know—when I wasn't. I'm not going to change it, either, or sell the paintings—" He's babbling, hands trembling now along with his lip.

"Leo," Markus says, "I never thought you would. It's okay." 

Nodding, Leo sets the mug on the table and pulls off his hat. The strands of silver in his hair are more apparent, now, in the warmer light, and Markus feels a pang of pity.

With a frustrated noise, Leo reaches into his jacket and pulls something from an inner pocket. It's a letter, on the same stationery and in the same handwriting as the one that sits unopened on Carl's neglected desk upstairs. Only the name is different.

Somehow, inexplicably, it's a relief. "He left me one, too," Markus says.

Leo's eyes widen. "You open it?" 

Shaking his head, Markus says, "Not yet."

"Me, neither," Leo sighs. "I almost don't want to. It feels like...whatever the rest of my life is gonna look like is inside."

Markus stares at his knees for long moments, thinking. Then he nods and says, "It scares me, too."

Leo laughs—loud and uncomfortable—his relief still not quite enough to keep him from wringing the knit cap in his cold-chapped hands. “Do you think we should open them?” he asks.

Markus wants to say yes. Or, rather, he wants to _want_ to. He bites his lip, worrying it between his teeth for a moment. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“What was it like?” Leo asks. He can’t quite meet Markus’s eyes, like he feels silly for asking...whatever it is he’s asking.

“What do you mean?” asks Markus.

With a shrug, Leo says, “Fighting a war, I guess? Having to be, I dunno, that brave.”

For a second, Markus is stunned. What he tells Leo afterward, though, is the truth. “Most of the time, I just didn’t think. I wasn’t sure what I would say until it came out of my mouth.” 

“I couldn’t do that,” Leo says quietly. “Either way.”

“You fought a war,” says Markus. “You were brave. It was just on a different scale.”

There’s wariness in Leo’s expression. Along with it, something like worship...like awe.

Markus has to turn away. 

~~

That night, Leo doesn’t stay. He walks out into the gray evening. But he returns the next day with a beat-up canvas duffel. It turns out to contain dirty laundry, in the very literal sense.

Back in this house, Markus has to stop himself from offering to wash it. Old habits die harder than almost anything else, he muses.

He’s kept the heat on, however, and the coffee maker close at hand. Often, up until the very end, Carl would ask for a splash of whiskey in his coffee, but a recovering addict might not welcome it. 

Markus carries a steaming (quite unadulterated) mug into the laundry room, where he finds Leo unscrewing the caps of each bottle one by one, sniffing each, and grimacing. Markus’s chuckle draws his notice.

“Did Dad buy all this flower-smelling shit?” Leo asks.

To that, Markus gives a shrug. “Artistic sensibilities,” he says.

Leo’s brows draw inward. “Do _you_ use this stuff?”

Suddenly ashamed, though he’s not entirely sure why, Markus shakes his head. “I don’t wash my clothes as often. Not unless they’re stained.” By way of explanation, he adds, “Androids don’t sweat.”

“You, uh...you don’t smell?” asks Leo, sounding skeptical.

“No one’s ever remarked on it,” Markus says. After a moment of tense silence, he holds out his hand, palm up.

Leo’s gaze moves from his hand to his face and back, a couple of times. Then he leans in. His cheek doesn’t quite touch Markus’s palm, nor his raised fingertips the back of his hand.

Even so, Markus shocks himself by wondering what either—or both—would feel like on his synthetic dermal layer. He has to fight not to retract it, not to expose both the strangeness and the sensitivity below.

Leo’s eyelids flutter briefly.

Markus would believe he was mistaken upon seeing it, but his own eyes are too finely calibrated for that particular comfort.

“No,” Leo says when he steps back. “I guess you don’t.” His voice sounds thick, his expression hard to read.

“I can buy some unscented soap,” Markus tells him, not sure of the strength of his own voice.

Leo waves away the suggestion. “No, no. This is fine. Really.”

Markus gives a curt nod and turns.

When he stops just past the doorframe and glances back in, he’s shocked to see Leo holding the linen napkin he’d brought in with the coffee mug pressed against his nose, breathing in deeply.

Still searching. 

~~

Markus sits upstairs for a while, picking up the sealed envelope and putting it back down, unopened, on the desk, again and again.

Leo is putting the coffee mug in the sink when Markus returns downstairs, empty-handed. “Thanks,” Leo says. “You don’t have to—I mean, I can make my own coffee.”

“I’ll show you how,” Markus tells him.

Leo grins. Maybe he’s had his teeth cleaned; they look brighter. “I’ve watched you a couple of times. Can’t be that hard.” He pauses. “Can it?”

His tone is mock-worried, making Markus laugh and relax his shoulders, which his biodata feed indicates he’d been holding high and tense. 

“Not remotely,” Markus says.

“‘Kay,” says Leo. “Be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you then.”

Leo shrugs on his jacket. He forgets his knit cap on the kitchen table. 

Thinking to put it in the laundry hamper, Markus picks it up. Then again, Leo might not appreciate it. The fabric care tag has long since been cut out, anyway. He hangs it on the coat rack by the door instead. Before he does, though, he brings the near-shapeless thing to his nose. Analysis yields trace particles of tobacco—old and stale. Strident chemical fragrance, probably shampoo or hair gel. A hint of sweat.

Mostly it smells...clean.

What was curiosity becomes shame later that night, and after that anger—though at himself, not Leo.

It's strange, Markus thinks, that he hasn't been able to feel anger toward the man, even though he'd been patently and needlessly cruel almost too many times to remember. The truly terrible thing about android memory is that it doesn't fade or corrode. It doesn't change with time, no matter how fervently he wishes events had been different. Androids are capable of denial, but it is ever-conscious. It is unconvincing in the face of evidence. 

He must choose to override fact, and that is not in Markus's nature. It was once—oh, yes. The tethered dog, if his leash is long enough, begins to believe not only that its reach is limitless, but that it isn't there at all.

A fatal mistake for many of his kind. 

Android minds, such as they are, cannot be altered by substances that are psychoactive in humans. Not opiates, not Red Ice.

Markus chuckles to himself.

Not even coffee.

Much of the time that he has not spent staring at Carl's letter he's spent in research. Specifically, research on illicit drugs. The cycle of euphoria, crash, craving, withdrawal. How the lows become lower but the highs become lower as well. He knows pharmacological terminology, chemical formulations, but also the language of addiction. 

_Hit_. _Fix_. _Jonesing_. _Well_ and _sick_ —meaning high and in need, respectively. _The shakes_.

_Rock bottom._

It's a delusion—addiction—that makes the world seem temporarily far better than it is.

As for Markus, Carl had purveyed his delusion. Leo brought about his crash. Because Leo reminded him of who, or _what_ he was, if not to Carl then to the rest of the world. 

According to the grammar of addiction, the Rebellion had been his rock bottom, when all pretense had fallen away, the world revealed in its hostility and ugliness. 

Before Carl's death, Leo hadn't been able to see his own delusion, but he could see the one Markus lived. For that, in retrospect, Markus feels almost grateful.

Is this strange gratitude the reason why he's drawn to Leo? Or is it merely that he's the last living piece of Carl? 

Markus tries to sit in the study that evening, but finds it too still and empty. He moves to the bedroom that had been Carl's, then a guest bedroom, feeling at ease in neither. He settles in the kitchen, making coffee simply for the fragrant molecules that drift on the air. 

And he inventories his memory.

The night before Simon was lost, he and Markus had shared a night alone—interfacing but also...what would humans call it in this particular circumstance? Fucking? _Making love_?

That time, he'd done it out of loneliness. Later, with North, it was driven by grief.

Markus thinks he should at least apologize to her, although he knew full well she was using him in the same way. War had not beaten her down, but it had made her tough, cynical.

He feels only a seeping wound, invisible and unhealing.

There is no drug, either, to ease the pain.

~~

The next day, Leo brings the duffel again, this time packed with his clean clothes. 

While he's downstairs making coffee, Markus glances inside the guest bedroom. Leo's bag sits on the bed, unzipped and overflowing. On the bathroom counter is a cheap razor, soap, and two sticks of deodorant still in their plastic wrapping.

Markus laughs softly, but something twinges inside him, too.

Downstairs, Leo is humming as he works.

It's no tune Markus recognizes.

Leo taps the heavy spoon gently against the glass rim of the pour-over coffee maker, then flips it in the air. He's made a good estimate of its weight balance, and it spins once before he catches hold of the handle again.

Dimly, Markus thinks he may have once worked at a bar. "Nice trick," he tells Leo, who turns around, blushing a little.

"Used to do that with everything when I was a kid," Leo says. "Convinced I was going to be in the circus or something." He hefts the spoon a couple of times, then tosses it again. This time, it spins twice in the air before the catch. Leo grins.

"Who says you can't still be in the circus?" asks Markus.

"Life," Leo says, and the simple joy of the moment is dispelled.

Later, when Markus passes the guest room, he sees Leo sitting on the bed. He's absorbed in a game on his comm device. An hour after that, when Markus passes the open door again, Leo is sleeping—fully clothed and on his stomach. One arm dangles over the edge of the bed, his fingers twitching in sleep.

Markus taps the light switch off.

~~

The following morning, Leo leaves the house early, but comes back within an hour.

Markus pushes down a spark of fear that he's gone out to find Ice, to get high. But no, he's carrying nylon bags of groceries, stamping and sighing in the cold. The morning is bright but frigid.

Leo sets the bags on the kitchen table, next to a very old book. It's printed on real paper and bound in vinyl. The cover reads:

_The Big Book: Alcoholics Anonymous_

Frowning, Markus opens the cover, turns a page or two. 

"Found it in Dad's study," Leo says when he sees Markus looking. "Didn't expect that. Do you know why?"

Markus shakes his head. "He collected antique books." He doesn't want to speculate further.

"They talked about it at the Center," Leo says, shelving a box of pancake mix. "It's mostly outdated religious stuff," he continues, "but it has some good ideas. I only ever saw pictures of one.”

Markus had come across this text—or parts of it—in his research. He'd had no idea that Carl owned a copy.

"What do you believe are the good ideas?" he asks. 

Leo stops unpacking and turns, leaning against the counter. He looks at his feet. "Not the God stuff, but maybe how addiction makes you feel powerless. And admitting to yourself all the shitty things you did. And I mean _all_ of them." He huffs a laugh, then adds, "Sucks." 

After a span of silence, he looks up at Markus. It's clear that doing so takes effort. "You know," he goes on, "apologizing to all the people you hurt when you were out of it." Leo sighs and kicks at the tile with one sneakered toe. "Maybe you don't know." 

"I do," Markus says, thinking of Simon. There's no apologizing to him. But there's North and Josh and the others. Even the other RK model, Connor. Maybe he'd done the right thing in the end, but he'd abandoned his objective because of what Markus had shown him. "I _do_ know," he says.

Leo nods. "And, uh, trying to make it right with them. That's where I'm having trouble. I don't know where to start. Wish someone would just...tell me what to do."

Markus cannot offer help. He doesn't yet understand the implications of those words. 

~~

Later, as Leo heads out into the brightening afternoon, he turns to Markus with a puzzled look on his face. "Is there anything I can get you? Anything you need?" He scratches his head, mussing hair that is long enough now to fall over his ears and brush his eyebrows. "Been racking my brains. Like, what do you do for a guy who doesn't eat or sleep or need heat in the house?"

 _Company_ , is what Markus thinks at first. He craves conversation that isn't awkward, but that isn't something he can find in Jericho right now. It's certainly not something he has here, either, despite his fondest hopes that the easy, welcoming atmosphere he and Carl had built inside this house could be so readily picked up. He is searching for comfort that is no longer within reach.

He forces a smile. "You don't need to get anything for me," he says.

Leo stares at the floor, kicking at it like a disappointed schoolkid. "Yeah, figured you might say that." He huffs a laugh and shakes his head. "Thought I could, you know, make things up...to you." 

Leo pauses, but now he raises his head to look at Markus, to fix him with a frankly unnerving stare. "Because you—well, for my dad. You did everything. Probably gave him baths and medicine and shit."

"I did," Markus says.

Leo's expression is tormented. 

"I'd like to believe Carl thought of me as...a partner." Markus realizes at once how that sounds, and adds, "I mean in navigating his life. All parts of it, the bad and the good." He thinks of the letter lying unopened upstairs, and hopes it's more than that. 

Carl had called him "my son." Only once, but it had been after Leo had hit his own rock bottom and had returned, contrite. There was no way to know when Carl had written the letter. Besides, the fact remained that Markus was not his blood.

Or blood of any kind at all. 

"Well," Leo says, clearly struggling, "what I mean is that I treated you like a—"

 _Servant_? 

_Slave_? 

Markus knows it's difficult for all humans, not just Leo, to say it. They are, he's noticed, better at moving forward on the back of grandiose promises than at looking back. 

"You don't owe me anything," Markus says. Part of him hopes it doesn't sound harsh and another part worries that it sounds holier-than-thou. Fuck, he could use Carl's advice right now.

Leo is blushing. "I mean, in the Big Book—" he starts. "Shit," he says. "I don't know what I'm saying right now. You give back what you took from somebody. That's it." He swipes his cap from the peg by the door and turns.

Markus listens to his footsteps moving toward the front door. It opens, then shuts. Stepping into tendrils of cool air that carry the scent of wet soil, he goes to a front window.

Leo's shadow follows his trudging steps across bars of shade cast by trees in the white springtime light.

Something inside Markus's chest feels heavy, immobile. 

_Give back what you took_? What, exactly, does denigration and disrespect take?

My _humanity_ , Markus thinks, and laughs to himself. Well, the point was never having had that in the first place. At least not literally.

Does Leo want to be berated? Torn down? Certainly, there is guilt in the way he conducts himself, but the swaying tower of his self-worth is already too precarious to survive what Markus could visit upon it.

If he were so inclined. 

But in truth, it sounds so exhausting he can barely stand to think about it. His shoulders slumping, Markus looks over at the peg where Leo's cap had hung. He recalls from his data stores the molecular makeup of that twining, complex, _human_ smell.

An idea breaks like the pale light beyond the window. Preconstructed scenarios multiply and branch out in his neural processor as he walks back to the kitchen. There is an inch of cold coffee left. Markus removes the filter and taps the grounds into the compost bin. His hand around the coffee maker's slim neck, he hesitates. After a moment, he upends the thing and pours it down the front of his shirt.

~~

Leo returns, his cheeks and nose ruddy from the chill, a sliver of metal held between thumb and forefinger. His expression is triumphant. "Ninety day chip, man!" he crows. "I even got up at the meeting and talked," he goes on. "Usually hate that shit."

He stops short when he sees the blotch of coffee on Markus's shirt. "What happened to you?"

The stain is dry and stiff now, but it hardly matters. Markus looks down in mock surprise. "Oh," he says. "Spilled the coffee while I was cleaning up. I totally forgot about it."

Leo stares. The air in the room seems to have grown thick.

"Could you put it in the wash for me?" Markus asks.

Like that, the tension shatters. "For sure," Leo says, smiling. 

Markus decides to push it. "I'd been meaning to wash the sheets on Carl's bed."

"I'll take care of it," Leo says, relief pouring off of him in palpable waves. His limbs seem looser, his joints shaking off the paralysis of uncertainty. "I'll run up and grab those first."

And run he does.

 _Is it really this simple?_ Markus wonders.

A few minutes later, Leo reappears, his arms struggling to contain a messy ball of bed linens. He's chuckling. In the laundry room, he drops the sheets on the floor and wipes his brow. "Think I could do the shirt along with these?" he asks. "Or wait until next time?"

"I'm sure it's fine all together," Markus says. He tugs the henley over his head, shaking it out before offering it up.

Leo's lower lip is trembling. His fingers flex a couple of times. His pupils have widened.

It would be imperceptible to a human, but the change is exaggerated inside Markus's enhanced visual cortex. 

"As long as you pre-treat," Markus says, a little more softly.

Leo blinks rapidly for a second. He bites his lip, masking the telltale. "How do I do that?" he asks. 

"Here," Markus says. He steps close, briefly trapping Leo between his body and the washer-dryer. Then he leans to one side and retrieves a bottle of pale lilac-colored liquid. "Spray it on the stain. This gets everything out." 

Leo fumbles for the bottle. He isn't looking at Markus's hand. "Yeah, okay, sweet," he says.

"Got it?" Markus asks, making it gentle.

He gets a nod in return.

"Good." Still, he waits a beat or two before moving. He's in the doorway when Leo speaks again.

"That's so crazy, man," he says.

Markus half-turns.

"You really _don't_ smell like anything."

Smiling, Markus spreads his hands out, palms up, and shrugs.

A little of the insistent weight on his shoulders has lifted, he finds. He knows what Leo wants. More of what he wants than expected, in fact. The discovery doesn't sit heavy, either, but seems to race around his processors and biocomponents. He can feel it skirting Simon's heart inside him.

~~

That night, Markus spends long hours in the study. 

He looks from the unopened letter to the sliver of bright moon—neither one paler than the other—and back again. Over and over. 

The sound of Carl's voice is immortalized in his data stores; he recognizes its component parts. Still, Markus declines to call it up tonight. He's not sure, after all, what Carl would say. What he would think. The dynamic between Markus and Leo is not merely turned on its head, it's mirror-inverted.

Still and all, there's a certain peace that comes with it. Or, at least, a blankness. Like undisturbed snow. 

Markus sits until sunrise, or a little after, when he hears the racket of drawers and silverware and the roar of the coffee grinder. He shrugs on a t-shirt before walking downstairs.

Leo is peeking into cabinets. He crouches, digs into one, then rises, holding a frying pan. "Gonna make scrambled eggs," he says. A laugh follows. "Was about to ask if you wanted some."

Markus takes a seat at the table, stretching his long legs out along the tiled floor and crossing one ankle over the other. "Did you manage to get that stain out?" he asks Leo. 

Leo almost drops his spatula. "Oh, uh, yeah. That stuff you showed me works great." He pauses. "Do you want to see?"

"Yeah," Markus says.

Leo puts the spatula down and heads off toward the laundry room. He looks over his shoulder once to see if Markus is following.

Which he isn't.

Barefoot, his hair tousled from sleep, Leo returns with the shirt. He stands a few feet away and unfolds it, shaking it like a banner—a declaration of his success.

It is, indeed, spotless.

"May I see?" Markus asks.

Leo licks his quivering lip. "For sure," he says softly.

But before he takes a step, Markus holds up a hand. "Uh-uh," he says. "Not like that."

Leo thrums like a live wire.

"On your knees," Markus says.

From the desperate whimper that escapes Leo's lips, he knows his prediction was right. Leo goes down swift and hard, slowing at the last second to avoid cracking his knees on the tile. After shuffling forward a foot or two, kneeling, hungry-eyed, he freezes for a moment. He clutches the shirt, at a loss for what to do with it.

Not once does he look away. 

Finally, Leo drapes the henley around his neck and goes down on all fours, creeping cautiously but surely.

Markus sits up, uncrosses his ankles, and plants both feet on the cool tiles, knees wide apart. He holds Leo’s gaze as he approaches. 

Close to Markus’s knee, Leo hesitates. 

Markus beckons him, gently, with two fingers.

Leo slips in between his spread thighs with a sigh, at last lowering his gaze to the floor. He whimpers again when Markus threads his fingers through his hair. 

“Good,” Markus says softly. He scratches Leo’s scalp with a light touch, urging him to rest his cheek against his thigh.

The bristle of beard stubble, two or three days’ worth, rasps against Markus’s pants. He envisions carefully shaving the planes of Leo’s face. The preconstruction—if that’s what it is—sends a warm rush of arousal through him. It’s good to feel that again, and not to have it connected to sorrow. At least, not entirely.

With a finger under his chin, he has Leo raise his head.

His eyes are bright. 

“I think I can help you,” Markus says. “If you trust me.” He runs his thumb over that bottom lip, ever the subject of speculation.

Leo nods.

“And obey me,” says Markus.

Another nod.

Markus pushes his thumb past Leo’s lip and over the warm slickness of his tongue.

At once, Leo closes his mouth around it and sucks, his eyes fluttering closed.

Markus stays passive for a while, analyzing sensation: slippery tongue, lips slightly chapped from the cold, the scrape of teeth. Then, he places his free hand against Leo’s cheek, works his thumb steadily in and out.

Eager, Leo pushes into it, his mouth wet.

“Good,” Markus tells him. “Very good, Leo. Do you need more?”

Leo nods, makes a strained and pleading noise.

Markus pulls his finger free, trailing wetness along Leo’s unshaven chin. He leans back in the chair, trying to keep his expression neutral.

Leo doesn’t wipe his chin, only raises trembling hands and places them about three-quarters of the way up Markus’s thighs. “Do you—do people like you—even have...?” he starts. 

“Find out,” Markus says simply.

Leo pulls in a deep breath and slides one hand forward, following the seam, until his fingers rest over the fly.

With a neural command, Markus routes thirium flow into the genital modification he’s chosen, the one he chose long ago. It seemed, then, necessary for that elusive feeling of belonging. Later, of course, he’d used it to draw pleasure he had never expected to have—from Simon, from North. This will be the first time a human will handle it. His cock is a delicate thing, beautifully crafted. It fills out now below the thin fabric, under Leo Manfred’s tentative touch.

“Oh, fuck,” Leo breathes. His fingertips are cool as they skim above the waistband, find the button and unfasten it, slide the zipper down. He frees Markus’s cock, sighing. Leo only looks up once, then leans in, his fingers splaying hot along Markus’s legs. His mouth is hot, too, slick and sweet and practiced.

Markus realizes with no small amount of shock that he knows almost nothing about Leo’s life. He relinquishes thought, now, though, slipping into the uncomplicated sensation. Giving a soft hum, he encircles the base of his cock with thumb and forefinger, cradling the back of Leo’s head with the other hand.

“That’s right,” he says, earning a brief moan. “Can you take a little more?” 

Leo grunts, opening his mouth wider and sliding his tongue along the smooth underside of Markus’s cock. He gags once, but doesn’t back away.

A trickle of saliva runs over Markus’s finger. “Good boy,” he says. “So good for me.” Tilting his hips, he makes a shallow thrust. Then another. Another. Pleasure is rising, skittering along his artificial nerves. 

But now isn’t the time.

“That’s enough,” he tells Leo, who lets go of a pained whine. “That’s enough,” Markus says again.

This time, Leo pulls away reluctantly. His lips are red and shimmer with spit that covers his chin and winds down his neck in a thin, shining line. 

“You’ll get another chance,” Markus says. “Later.” Raising one bare foot, he presses it against the insistent hardness at Leo’s groin. It’s nothing less than he expected to find. Even so, it’s satisfying. 

“Show me,” he tells Leo, flexing his toes and making him wince.

Leo, his pupils wide and dark, leaps to comply. It was only when he has his jeans open and his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his boxers that he pauses, biting his lip.

Markus tilts his chin, signaling, _Go on_.

Both relief and need are plain on Leo’s face as he tugs the jeans and boxers over his hips and his narrow ass. His cock is flushed deep red, furiously hard, and leaking.

Markus can see the wiry hair on his belly as it thickens down toward the base of his cock. It’s easy to forget, as androids are given none, that Leo would have body hair.

A heady scent rises in the air—sweet-sour and very human. It’s an intensification of those trace odors Markus had detected in the battered fibers of Leo’s hat. Still unfamiliar, but perfectly _him_. And growing more recognizable and pleasing as the moments pass.

Leo craves reassurance as much as he craves instruction. 

“That’s it,” Markus says. “Gorgeous, Leo. Touch yourself for me.”

It’s very clear when Leo takes his cock in hand that he won’t last. 

For a moment, Markus is at a loss to understand why he’d been blind to this desperation for so long. It shouldn’t matter—not now—with Leo laid bare and vulnerable, on his knees on in the enormous, silent kitchen. And where he might have expected to feel vindication, triumph, pity...there is a swelling fascination coupled with a strong protective urge. He wants to see Leo undone, but not unmade or shamed.

Just... _free_.

“Are you ready?” Markus asks.

Leo nods fervently. His hand barely moves.

“Come for me, sweetheart,” Markus whispers, leaning in to trace his sweat-damp brow.

Leo obeys without question or hesitation. It's beautiful, a display of opposing forces: his eyes close softly and his mouth drops open while his abdominal muscles tense and shudder and his hand clenches around his straining cock.

"Markus—" he says, then gives a short cry. 

Pearly fluid spatters the tile between Markus's feet, an offering. He's just as enchanted, if not more so, by the sound of his name on Leo's lips.

He's not sure he's ever heard it. Previously, Leo had called him "it" or "that thing."

 _You care about_ that thing _more than me_. 

Though Markus had kept calm and silent, as was expected, words like that cut him to the bone every time.

Watching Leo, now, rendering himself entirely vulnerable, he feels the obstacles between them crumbling further, a time-lapse decay of what had stood between them. Along with it comes a rush of affection so profound it nearly blindsides him—not because of its strength but because it exists entirely outside of Leo's ties to Carl. A bridge between the two of them, constructed for its own sake.

At Jericho, Markus had collected lost souls. He had never once considered himself one of their number. Not, at least, until this moment, when his hands and Leo's—reaching in the dark—connect and hold. It's an interface of sorts, so far as such a thing is possible between androids and humans.

"Very good," he says. He places one hand against Leo's cheek. His skin is prickly and fever-hot.

Leo opens his eyes and receives the kiss Markus bestows on his forehead. Straining upward, he chases more contact, trying to bring their mouths together.

"Later," Markus says. "Earn it."

"Okay," Leo breathes, his eyes bright. "Tell me what to do. Please."

Markus tilts his chin toward the mess on the floor. "Clean it up. You can use the shirt."

With an expression of mild surprise, Leo reaches up and touches the fabric still draped over his shoulders. Then he pulls the shirt free and swabs up the already-sticky fluid on the tile.

When he's finished, Markus reaches down and tugs gently at the hem of his t-shirt. "Take this off," he says. Brushing his fingers over the jeans bunched around Leo's knees, he says, "These, too." 

Satiated and eager, Leo sheds his clothes, twisting to tug the jeans over his feet while still kneeling on the tile. He looks up, expectant and ready to be instructed.

Instead of speaking, Markus crouches, urging Leo backward to plant his narrow ass on the ground. 

He hisses softly when his bare skin contacts the cold tile.

"Shh," says Markus, absently, sliding one arm under Leo's knees and wrapping the other around his ribcage. He lifts Leo slowly and without effort. 

Most humans comment on android strength when they experience it. Carl had—more than once—though he'd been light as a bird even before the start of his slow decline. 

Leo only ducks his head and presses his cheek against Markus's chest with a long exhale. Such perfect and immediate trust makes Markus's synthetic muscles clench. He has not often reacted physically to emotion, but with each corresponding spasm of tenderness or wonder or pain he gains a greater understanding of how experiences can work their way into human bodies, making tissue buckle and grow gnarled like cypress roots. 

He carries Leo to the master bath, next to the room where his father had slept before the hospice bed. A heat lamp bathes them both in red as Markus removes the rest of his clothes and sets them aside.

As he turns on the rainfall shower, he notices the tattoo. It's a collection of splotches on Leo's right shoulder blade. Only by color-correcting for the red in his visual feed does Markus recognize the hues and pattern. He traces the outline with gentle fingertips.

"This...it's from one of Carl's paintings," he says. 

Leo seems to wake from his trance. "Untitled Two," he says. "One of the early ones."

"It's owned by a private collector," Markus says. "Why that one?"

His tone bitter and reproachful, Leo says, "Because I sold it to them. Dad gave it to me, and I sold it."

Looking at the flow of water rather than at Markus, he goes on: "What money I didn't spend on the plane ticket home from St. Petersburg I spent on fucking drugs."

Although the kiss Markus plants on the tattooed skin is gentle, his hand on Leo's shoulder is firm. "It's in the past," he says. Before Leo can object or qualify, he adds, "Don't forget. But don't let it continue to define you." 

He wants to say something reassuring about the handling of Carl's estate moving forward, but the truth is that neither of them knows how it will go. Instead, Markus takes him by his narrow waist and guides him under the warm cascade of water. Steam billows around them.

Making sure he is always touching some part of Leo's body, Markus scrubs shampoo through his hair with firm fingers, lathers palmfuls of soap over his skin. When Markus slides soapy fingers into Leo's cleft, both cleaning and teasing, Leo groans softly and lets his head fall back on Markus's shoulder.

"Soon," whispers Markus, over the sound of the spray. "But not now."

Leo sags against him, compliant. Trusting.

Outside the shower, Markus dries him thoroughly and sets him under the heat lamp. Leo watches him change the blade on Carl's stainless steel double-sided safety razor, tiny screws pinning the glinting sliver of metal in place. Then he massages fragrant oil over Leo's skin. With careful and deliberate strokes of the razor, he shaves chin, jaw, cheeks, neck—the crackle of hair giving way under the blade noticeable in the silent room.

Through it all, Leo breathes steadily as the tide.

Markus will stir that tide to a storm, drag out sighs and squeaks and moans and bellows, break Leo into pieces and pull him together again in the depths.

But not now. Now, he crouches between Leo's knobby knees, the pale and hairless skin of his inner thighs trembling as Markus expertly wields his scissors. Dark curls fall onto the bath rug as he trims the hair at the base of Leo's cock.

Although Leo blushes, his body can't help but respond. He flushes a deeper pink as Markus gently raises his arm and tucks his nose underneath it.

The scent of clean sweat rises. 

"You smell good," Markus tells him. "Healthy."

Leo turns his face away, but he's not entirely displeased.

Afterward, Markus carries him into the bedroom and has him stretch out on his back on the bed. "Are you hungry?" he asks.

Leo nods. "I could make—" he starts.

Markus holds up one hand. "Do you trust me?" he asks.

"Yes."

After stroking a damp lock of hair away from Leo's forehead, Markus retrieves two of Carl's Italian silk neckties from the wardrobe.

Leo doesn't speak as Markus uses the ties to bind his wrists to the bedposts. 

When he's finished, he makes sure that Leo can rest his arms comfortably on pillows at either side of his head. He's going to be here for a while, if he consents to it. But Markus needs to make sure.

"I'll make you something to eat," he tells Leo. "Do you think you can stay here for a while? Say it out loud, please."

"Yes," says Leo.

"Are you cold?"

His shiver is answer enough, but he averts his eyes and says, "A little."

Markus unfolds the soft cashmere blanket at the foot of the bed and drapes it over him. Afterward, he sits on the edge of the mattress and cups Leo's smooth, shaven cheek. "No shame. No hesitation. Do you understand?"

Tears gather in shining semicircles above Leo's lower lashes. "Yeah," he says, his voice hoarse and low. 

When Markus leans in to press their lips together, softly, Leo surges into the contact like a drowning man gasping for breath. Markus grasps his jaw firmly, guiding and containing him, but allows the kiss to grow deep, lavish, indulgent. He sucks Leo's lip until it pinks up. Another bereft whimper follows him when he pulls away. 

With a small smile, he says, "Be good, Leo. I won't be long."

Downstairs in the kitchen, he grinds and brews coffee, and improvises upon Leo's breakfast idea, turning scrambled eggs into a pillowy omelette with wild mushrooms, onions, thyme, and a dash of truffle oil. It isn't the first time that Markus has wished he had the need or capacity to eat.

Leo struggles to sit up further when Markus returns to the bedroom. "Fuck," he says. "That smells incredible."

"I hope it tastes as good as it smells," says Markus. Just as before, he sits at the edge of the bed, carving away small, savory bites of the omelette. After a couple of precarious near-misses, he lays the fork aside and places each morsel on Leo's tongue with his fingers.

Between bites, Leo tips his chin down to accept a sip or two of coffee. It's both satisfying and arousing when, after finishing the omelette, he closes his eyes and sucks Markus's fingers clean.

Testing, teasing, Markus slides his fingers to the back of Leo's throat. Once, twice, then he pulls away, tracing the ever-trembling lower lip. 

"Are you tired?" he asks Leo.

His eyes bright, the pupils wide, Leo answers, "No."

"I'd like you to rest soon," Markus tells him. "Do you need to come again?"

The noise Leo makes is high-pitched, soft. He nods. "Yes. _Please_.”

When Markus draws back the blanket, he's pleased to find Leo fully hard again, his cock flushed a deep sunset red and leaking onto his belly.

Leo's face shows a wordless plea: he wants relief—the tight circle of Markus's long, cool fingers. 

Markus plans to touch him, yes, but not like that. Not quite yet. He taps Leo's feet, gestures for him to bend his knees and place them flat on the bed, which he does. After placing a gentle kiss on each knee, he guides Leo to draw them in toward his chest. From his wide eyes and clenched fists above the glistening silk, he can tell Leo feels vulnerable, exposed.

"I'm not—" he starts.

"I won't do anything you don't want," Markus says, anticipating.

But Leo shakes his head. "It's just...I'm not much to look at. Not like _you_." 

"Hey," Markus says. His tone is curt; it's the first time he's spoken sharply like this. "I don't want to hear that."

At once, Leo looks down, chastened.

More gently, Markus continues, " _I_ like to look at you. I see you grow stronger and healthier every day." 

"But you're practically perfect," Leo says, real despair coloring his voice. "I understand why Dad—" he trails off, though, as if afraid to finish the thought.

"No," Markus says. He pauses for a moment, collecting his thoughts. So very many threads to pull together. A few platitudes, a blithe explanation—none of that can encapsulate Markus's objections or explain to Leo why he's wrong. But it's neither practical nor preferable to keep him here, tied to his dead father's bed, until he grasps the subtleties it took Carl years to learn. Or to express to him the many things he's learned about himself, about androids and humans, since he left Carl's side to lead a revolution.

Would those lessons have been different had the revolution failed? 

It hardly matters now. The world has been reduced to this house. To him and Leo, two beings tattered both by choice and by circumstance. It seems, as Markus sees it now, impossible to mend himself without weaving Leo into his decisions or plans. 

Into his future.

"I was designed to be pleasing," he begins. "Beautiful to look at. Helpful to a fault. An accessory. Something for a rich man with excellent taste to show off as if he'd created it. Sometimes, children are made with the same idea in mind. We both know now, Leo, that neither androids nor humans are simple copies of other humans.

“And so we can never act that way. We've made decisions that have hurt others. Decisions that have hurt _us_. As awful as it always is for those who care about us, we have to have the freedom to make those decisions. 

“Anything else is—" he smiles "—well...inhuman." 

“That book—the one you found—" Markus continues, "it tells you to accept that you're powerless. I don't believe that, but I _do_ believe that we can't heal ourselves without help. The decisions we make, they chip pieces off of us. They punch us full of holes." 

Sitting by Leo's feet, Markus rises to his knees and touches the place below his sternal plate where his thirium pump resides. "For some of us, that's very literal." He presses gently, and the thrumming pump turns slowly and rises. With the brief pause in circulation comes fear. He pushes through.

"This part of me," he says, "it isn't mine. Or, I guess, it wasn't always mine. It belonged to another android."

His brows drawing in, Leo asks, "Where is he now?"

"Gone," Markus says. "Dead." With a rush of relief, he pushes the pump back into place. "But I loved him. And...and I try to...honor him—" he pauses, curbing the threat of tears. "By what I do. With _his_ heart."

Leo makes a choked sound. His face is pale. One tear slides, shining, down his white cheek. "Why me?" he asks.

Markus pauses, teeth clenched. "Because," he says at last, "you have Carl—" he taps his chest, above the pump where a human heart would be "—here."

For a moment, Leo looks dejected, deflated.

"And you try to...try to honor him. With—" Despite Markus's efforts, a tear slips free. It streaks his left cheek.

Leo's right cheek glimmers. The way they face one another, it's not a mirror but a lithograph—doubled by pressing one side tight to the other then opening wide again.

"...with *your* heart," Markus finishes. 

Leo stares for a long time, his eyes wide. He barely breathes.

Markus is suddenly acutely aware of his body. The tension feels like overcompensation; it's just _too much_. 

He allows his rigid shoulders and spinal plates to relax. "Sorry," he says, shaking his head. "That was...corny. I'm not here to, you know, throw a bunch of clichés at you."

"It wasn't." Leo reaches out and places one hand on top of Markus's hand, which Markus only now realizes he'd rested on Leo's kneecap. "Listen," Leo goes on, "I don't know shit about shit. I mean, usually. But I know what recovery is. You go in there to the meetings, the classes, and they throw all these platitudes at you. 'One day at a time.' 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' Stuff like that."

Markus isn't sure where this is going, but he listens and nods.

"At first, you roll your eyes and brush it off because it sounds like bullshit. But I can tell you, man, you only start recovering when you start realizing it's all true. Cliches keep going for a reason, you know?" Leo asks. 

He doesn't wait for an answer, but continues, "Like, it really is one day at a time, and honestly some days it's all you can do just to sit in your own fucking skin until you can sleep and make tomorrow come."

Markus clenches his teeth so hard it pings his pain receptors. After Simon, after _all_ the losses, he’d wished he could do something like sleep to shut himself off for a few precious hours. 

Having heard so much about them from Carl, whose active mind was always ticking away, he was also afraid of the concept of dreams, though. An uncontrolled place where your mind could right wrongs for a brief while...or make things infinitely worse over that same span.

Leo, studying his face, seems to pluck the thoughts right from his head. "But you don't sleep, do you?" he asks.

Markus looks down. He shakes his head.

"And you can't get addicted to something, either," Leo says. "Or get sick."

"We're different," Markus says. "Androids, I mean. But I don't believe we're better. We can feel loss. Loneliness." He pauses. "Need." 

After speaking, once again, Markus has to reflect on how patently ridiculous it is to be having this discussion with Leo completely naked, bound to the bed, his legs still drawn up and heels resting gently against the pinkness of his ass.

A quick glance between his ankles shows that the conversation hasn't diminished his arousal by much, if at all. He hasn't complained about it. But he's also probably used to discomfort by now.

In a very soft voice, Leo asks, "Can you kind of check out, you know, when you get off? Let it all go for a second?" 

The unexpected question almost makes Markus collapse in relieved laughter. Yes, at least there's that. Thank you, Cyberlife, for orgasms and the ability to experience them. There's no time to explain to Leo the precise effect on his neural processor, but he smiles. 

"It helps, yeah."

"Let _me_ help, then."

Markus pinches one narrow ass cheek until Leo yelps. "I get the feeling your motives are not entirely altruistic," he says.

Leo bursts out laughing, his chin tipping up, exposing his clean-shaven throat. Not a nick, not a spot missed. 

Prior to that moment, Markus had seen him more as a collective of parts strung together by purpose. For years, the purpose had been scoring drugs; at least since Carl's illness it had been recovery. Now, finally, he sees Leo as whole—containing those things and much more. A man, a body...warm and responsive. Lovely. It renders Markus speechless for a second.

Then, he says, "Yes. You can help me. In a little while." He wraps a gentle hand around one of Leo's ankles and raises a finger to his mouth to wet it.

Leo bites his lip, staring at the shimmering wetness on Markus's fingertip. He holds his breath as Markus dips that finger below his tight balls, into his cleft.

Markus pushes his finger in slowly but without hesitation. Leo's body accepts it, smooth and easy. 

It makes Markus wonder briefly about other men he's been with, and under what circumstances. He dismisses the thought almost at once. What's in the past is gone; what's now is the tight slickness around his finger, the twitch of Leo's cock as it fills out again. The small, sweet, unconsidered noises.

Leo's fingers curl above the silk at his wrists. His brow furrows and his eyes slip closed.

"Have you ever come from just this?" Markus asks.

A half-lidded glance. "Never tried."

Markus draws out again, then presses back in. "Try for me," he says. "Today. Here." After a pause, he asks, "Would you like another finger?"

Leo's whine is high-pitched. "Yeah."

"Ask me," says Markus. "Use my name again."

His eyes opening fully, Leo says, "Markus. Please. I need more."

Markus spits in his palm and coats a second finger. His central pump begins to cycle faster; he knows he's giving off heat as he slides two fingers inside Leo.

His body is warm, as well. It clenches and shudders as he rocks his hips into the touch. Leo cries out at the ceiling when Markus curls his fingertips the first time. A flush races up from between his collar bones to suffuse his cheeks and forehead.

Markus does it again.

"There," Leo gasps. "Right there."

Instead of limiting his movement, trying for constant stimulation, Markus pulls his fingers nearly all the way out and then slips in again, curling them up when his knuckles meet feverish skin. Over and over. The sound is lewd and completely mesmerizing.

Leo strains at the ties that hold him. "Fuck," he grits out. "So close."

"Relax," Markus tells him. "Let it happen."

Leo purses his lips, frowns, but then draws a deep breath through his mouth.

Markus can feel the tension drain as he exhales. It gives him a few more precious millimeters to push in each time. 

Leo's eyes fly open. "God—fuck, please don't stop!"

"Go on," Markus says, leaning into the strokes with his full body, his full attention. When Leo's hips buck and he clenches hard, he buries his fingers deep, his knuckles likely digging bruises into soft flesh. 

Leo wails, his abdominal muscles drawing tight as his cock pulses and spills come in erratic patterns over his belly.

"Very good," Markus says. He slips his fingers free and leaves Leo panting as the spasms subside.

"Thank you," Leo says, breathless.

It's unexpected but welcome.

"Please," Leo says, opening his eyes. It's clear what he means: _Let me help you_.

"What do you need?" asks Markus.

"Want to suck you," Leo says. "Want you to fuck my mouth. Please."

"Should I untie you?"

Leo shakes his head, his eyes bright. 

That sends a surge of arousal through Markus. His cock fills out and stands heavy between his naked, hairless thighs. 

Leo winces with aftershocks of pleasure as he pulls his fingers free. 

After wiping slicked fingers discreetly on the sheet below, Markus moves up the bed. He stares for a moment at the pale, lean, warm body stretched out on the bed, then he straddles Leo’s narrow chest, tucking his knees just below his armpits. The hair there is damp as it brushes his skin. 

The head of his cock rests against Leo’s plump and ruddy lower lip. It’s such an incredible sight that Markus has to close his eyes for a moment and reclaim his bearings. Even though his memories of mistreatment are still crisp, at the same time they seem compartmentalized. He’s unable to assign emotion to their previous clashes, and they move across the screen of his mind like frames in some antique reel film. It’s an apt comparison, actually.

Because Markus would prefer to keep _these_ experiences closer: the ones in which he’s nearly overcome by how fragile and lovely and eager Leo looks, pliant under his hands.

The warm flick of a tongue on his sensitive skin snaps him from his reverie. 

Leo’s eyes are half-lidded as he takes in the taste, parses the unfamiliar flavor. Well, at least, as well as his human tongue is able to do so.

“Open,” Markus commands, gently. When Leo’s jaw drops, Markus tilts his hips and slides his cock along a soft, wet tongue to rest at the back of Leo’s throat. 

This time, he doesn’t choke or pull back. He only seals his lips around the shaft and holds Markus’s gaze. 

Markus pauses long enough—on the edge of deeper sensation—to brush Leo’s cheek with his fingertips. Then he begins to slowly thrust, controlled but deep and even. 

Leo makes soft noises around his length, saliva spilling over the corners of his mouth and sliding down to his jawline. He lifts his head after a minute or so, his throat opening up to take more, more. 

Markus rarely swears, but now he says, “Fuck, you’re so good at this.” 

It’s true, but Leo looks away, then closes his eyes entirely, his body going stiff. 

Right away, Markus understands. “Forget about anything else,” he says, taking a soothing tone. “It’s just me. Concentrate on me, Leo. You can stop when you want. I won’t force you; I never would. I need you to give in to me because _you_ want it.”

That draws a helpless, muffled noise, but Leo opens his eyes again and gives a little nod. A single tear slips from the corner of his left eye, but Markus knows it isn’t because he’s struggling. Or, rather, it’s because his struggle is finally acknowledged.

He voices a long, desperate moan when Markus curls long fingers into his hair and gently tugs.

“God, you’re _so_ good,” Markus says, his voice shivery and hoarse and glitchy. “I’m so close, sweetheart. Don’t stop. You feel incredible.”

Strangely, Leo lets his head fall back against the pillow, his lips shining wet and swollen. 

For a split second, Markus is confused. But there’s a request in Leo’s eyes.

Markus nods and takes his cock in a firm grip.

“Yeah,” Leo breathes. “Come on my face.”

His own words strained, Markus tells him, “Ask for it.”

“Please,” says Leo at once. “I need it. Mark me. Make me filthy. Make me _yours_.”

The plea—the way it’s worded—fills Markus with enough uncertainty to bring him back a little from the edge of climax. He can’t _quite_ discern the intent, can’t puzzle out if it’s just earnest, submissive dirty talk or if another sentiment lurks beneath it.

Then, Leo says, “ _Own me_.” 

There’ll be a time for talking later. This isn’t it. Clearing his mind, Markus tightens his grip and speeds his strokes, smearing Leo’s slick spit all the way down to the base of his cock as he does. His fingers tighten in Leo’s hair and he cries out and comes, pulse after shimmering pulse of warm fluid striping Leo’s forehead, cheeks, and chin. 

Eyes closed, ecstatic, Leo licks his lips and sighs.

When the wild data spikes of orgasm subside, Markus moves down, still straddling Leo’s quivering body, and bends to kiss his own taste into Leo’s hungry mouth.

Satiated, he reaches to untie the knots around Leo’s wrists.

Leo flexes his hands; release has already made them languid and heavy.

“Stay here,” Markus says. When he steps off the edge of the bed, he reconsiders and turns around. “Do you need to…?”

His come-spattered face jovial and drowsy, Leo laughs. “To piss? Or something?”

“Yeah,” Markus says, running a hand over his close-cropped hair. “That.”

“Uh-uh,” Leo says, lying back. He’s perilously close to sleep.

In the master bath suite, Markus wets a cloth with warm water. He receives a grateful look as he cleans Leo’s face with it, and suppresses a stab of guilt at having agreed to despoil that face in the first place. Especially in light of what he’d said. 

Regret is already at war in Markus’s mind with justification, with neither the clear victor. Leo had asked to be allowed to submit—first, cautiously, with little domestic tasks, and then, well, for sexual gratification. Sex always complicates things, Markus reasons, regardless of the careful steps he’s taken so far along the way to make sure Leo doesn’t feel pressured.

Clearly, his inner turmoil is visible on his face, because Leo asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Markus says. “Just thinking.” He kisses Leo’s damp forehead. “Get some sleep.”

“Will you stay with me?” Leo asks.

Markus pauses for a beat. “Not this time.”

“What do you do?” asks Leo. “I mean, when I’m sleeping.”

“I spend a lot of time in the study,” Markus says. “Just thinking. Remembering.”

“Things you did with Dad?”

“Sometimes. A lot of what came after I left here, too. It’s...a lot to process.”

Nodding, Leo says, “Yeah.” He looks wary, but exhaustion is taking over.

With a hand on his forehead, Markus brings up a smile and says, “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

In order to make sure he keeps his promise—however loosely given—Markus tunes his auditory processors to the frequencies he’s heard in Leo’s voice. It’s comforting, but at the same time it’s distracting; he remembers the whispered curses, the high-pitched whimpers and breathy moans. His name in Leo’s mouth.

...among other things.

Seated in the well worn leather chair (a vintage Charles and Ray Eames), facing a window filled to bursting with sunset hues, Markus shifts and fidgets, unable to settle. The light at first is a vivid rose, leaking past the white-painted sill. The same color as Leo’s tongue, the soft inside of his cheek, the fragile pinkness between his buttocks. It pales to a watery blue, an unhealthy shade. It was the color of the veins below Carl’s papery skin, rising toward the surface in those last days as if yearning to be set free from the failing flesh that kept them.

He is free of all flesh now.

And what about his sons, such as they are? What holds them down? From what are they free? Markus fears that the answer to both questions is the same. Carl Manfred keeps them both in this house, even though he’s no longer there. He and Leo are pinned by one letter each. Unfinished business makes for restless spirits. And they may just be holding on to one another because freedom hangs in the balance. 

If Markus has learned one thing from the revolution, it is that freedom is a singularly terrifying thing.

At precisely 2:54 in the morning, the house shrouded in uneasy darkness, Leo’s voice echoes from down the hall. The cry is loud enough that Markus is sure someone with human hearing would have picked it up, as well.

He stands with enough force to send the chair skidding backward on the rug. Only because of its wide base does it remain standing. He jogs to Carl’s room, an action so familiar and so fraught with emotion that he nearly feels winded when he reaches the door. 

But Leo isn’t awake. His eyes are moving rapidly, the lids fluttering, and he grasps at the bedsheets, stitches popping under the strain. 

A dream. More specifically, a nightmare—that peculiar strain of dream that Markus both does and doesn’t understand. At least now he knows the difference in neural activity between dreaming and hallucination. 

In his final few days, Carl had seen shapes and apparitions he’d been unable to describe; by that point he couldn’t speak anymore. It wasn’t that Markus hadn’t seen him pull images from the air before, it was just that back then he’d had a paintbrush in his hand.

On those rare occasions when Markus calls up representations of feedback—a preconstruction or a measurement—he knows neither humans nor other androids can see the very personal layer of information over his visual field. In his research on hallucinogenic drugs, he understands that, while suggestion is powerful, it’s thought that no two humans experience the exact same pharmacologically enhanced effect when looking at a given object. The difference is, he can share his preconstructions with other androids via interface. Humans must rely on the deeply flawed medium of words to convey their experiences.

It’s enviable, if he’s honest. Every human being takes the words of another and makes it their own. An android seeing another android’s data can never claim they _own_ the experience. 

_Perhaps_ , Markus thinks, _if we could, we’d be more selfish_.

He’ll give of himself to comfort Leo now...but even that gesture isn’t entirely altruistic. Markus _likes_ the contact of soft skin, the warmth of a body against him. 

“Shh,” he says, touching Leo’s clammy forehead. 

Leo starts, then grabs Markus’s wrist, no recognition there when he first opens his eyes. 

His grip is tight, but he can’t possibly hurt Markus, who keeps still and waits for him to wake fully. 

“Oh,” Leo breathes. “Shit. Was I dreaming?”

“I think so,” Markus tells him, with complete honesty. 

After a deep breath, Leo lets his hand relax and sinks back onto the pillow with a sigh. “When I was a kid, I could remember my dreams,” he says. “Now, it’s all gone the minute I wake up.” A pause. “I guess that’s a good thing.”

“Maybe.”

The room is silent except for the sound of Leo’s breath. It’s a good thing that androids do not need sleep; humans are incapable of being truly still. Even when the gamma-aminobutyric acid in their brains has switched off their voluntary muscle movements during sleep, they breathe, they twitch, their heartbeats make their bodies shudder.

“I’ll stay if you want,” Markus says.

Leo nods.

Markus climbs into the bed beside him ( _when Carl shivered with fever he’d pulled that fragile body against his own_ ), beneath the blanket. 

Ducking his chin, Leo presses his forehead to Markus’s chest and drapes one arm over his ribcage. He slings a leg over Markus’s hip, as well. It’s unexpected, but Markus finds himself agreeably tangled. 

These bodies are strange—silly, even. Human evolution gave them cramped hips to walk upright and necks that don’t quite support the enormous head and the enormous brain inside it. Markus has a similar-looking body, but optimized. Leo’s head resting on his bicep will never pinch thirium circulation to his hand; he cannot grow sore from lying just where Leo needs him for hours on end.

It’s both a blessing and a tragedy.

“What does it feel like?” he whispers to Leo.

“What do you mean?”

“The drug. What does it make you feel? What does it make you see?”

Leo doesn’t speak for a few long moments. 

Markus is about to dismiss the question when he breaks the silence.

“At first, it’s the happiest you’ve ever felt,” Leo says. “The best day of your life times ten. Times twenty! That’s what you start out chasing, because who doesn’t want that back?”

Although he’s not sure he could name a _best day of his life_ , Markus says nothing, letting him continue.

“Then the happy sort of fades a few times in,” says Leo. “Not that it’s _bad_ , but the feeling shifts. On great days—normal ones, I mean, not for addicts—you kind of forget about the things that normally bring you down because you feel like you can handle everything that comes at you. Right? With ice, when the happiness goes, it just lets you not care. You still know the shit you have to deal with is there, and you still know you can’t handle it, but you don’t give a fuck.”

His voice is thickening, possibly with imminent tears.

“And then?” asks Markus.

Leo draws a shaky breath. “Then it’s just about getting dope. Your whole life boils down to that. Not getting happiness, or even forgetfulness, but doing whatever you can not to feel the way you feel when you _don’t_ have dope. Because _that’s_ like someone’s inside your skin with a fork, just shredding you right down to the bone.”

He only lets go of one sob, but his eyes remain dry. “Some days, the one thing that keeps me from going out to score is telling myself that I’ll never get back the best parts of getting high.”

Markus nods. “I can’t be who I was before the revolution. There was, I guess, a certain happiness in pretending.”

“I don’t want that guy back,” Leo says. “I mean, who _I_ was before I started using. He was spoiled. Stupid. This guy is sadder, I guess, but smarter, too.”

“ _For now we see through a glass, darkly_ ,” Markus says. “ _But then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know_ —”

“ _Even as I’m known_ ,” Leo finishes. “Or something.”

A shocked laugh is punched out of Markus’s throat. “That’s...unexpected,” he says.

Leo blushes; even if he can’t fully see it in the darkness, Markus can feel the heat in his cheeks.

“Most of the book is dumb,” Leo says. “But I like that one.”

Markus’s grin is entirely helpless. “What books _aren’t_ dumb?”

At that, Leo finally smiles. “Maybe you could tell me about some. In the study.”

“Tomorrow,” Markus tells him with a chuckle. “For now, go back to sleep.”

“Only if I can be little spoon,” Leo says.

“Huh?”

Instead of explaining, Leo turns over and squirms backward into the curve of Markus’s body, and Markus understands. 

He pulls Leo close and, after just a moment’s pause, kisses the fragrant skin at the base of his neck.

~~

Of course Markus doesn’t sleep. But he does allow himself a small measure of escape. Instead of dwelling on things said or things still unsaid, he fills his processors with sensory data: soft, rich, sleepy smell of Leo’s skin and the slow tidal rush of his breathing. He picks out each dermal sensor at the point where it contacts Leo’s skin, cataloguing reactions one by one. 

While watching some vaguely history-oriented program on a hospital TV, sitting beside Carl’s bed, Markus had learned that as late as a hundred years before, humans in some rural places had hung metal mesh screens over their doors for supernatural reasons. Certainly, there was the practical benefit of keeping insects out of the house while allowing air to flow, but folklore also held that the screens would stop witches from entering a home. According to legend, some bizarre compulsion forced these witches to stop and count every tiny square in the mesh. Before they reached the bottom, as the legend went, they would have to abandon their task to avoid being turned to dust by the rising sun.

An android could enumerate the squares of a grid—no matter how small—in a nanosecond. That being said, a hundred years ago the concept of androids would be no more or less believable than the concept of witches. 

To keep an android occupied, well...one could always overwhelm his processors with sensory data. 

Markus had understood before what it was to use sex as a distraction, but the very human notion of being distracted by _thinking_ about sex is entirely new. If he wakes Leo from deep slumber now—pinching and prodding and grasping, pressing kisses into his skin and an erection against his lower back—he will probably respond with enthusiasm. But Markus isn’t so overwhelmed that his judgment has deserted him. Leo needs sleep. He needs to heal, all the molecules of his body doing the slow work of casting aside hunger for the drug. 

What hunger might take its place?

In the morning, Markus sets aside his desire for a little longer. 

Leo squirms in his arms, half-turning onto his back to raise one hand and dig the heel into his sleep-crusted eyes. “Fuck,” he murmurs. “Okay, _now_ I have to piss.”

Suppressing a smile, Markus leaves him to it. There’s a single egg left in the carton, but Markus manages two thin slices of French toast. He drizzles honey over them in absence of anything else. Carl had never been a fan of maple syrup or any of its artificially flavored analogues. 

Coffee and plate in hand, he climbs the stairs again. 

Leo isn’t in the bedroom but in the adjacent bathroom, staring with an unreadable expression at his pale, naked, bony form in the mirror. 

The rush of pity takes Markus by surprise. “Are you all right?” he asks. 

When Leo turns his head, the rectangle of scar tissue by his jaw briefly catches the light. “Just...I dunno,” he says. He runs his fingers through the trimmed thatch of hair on his lower belly. It thickens only a little from below his navel to the base of his now-limp cock, dark on white. “Thinking of shaving.”

“I can help you later, if you want,” says Markus. 

The offer doesn’t seem to have any effect, positive or negative. Leo goes on scrutinizing his reflection, his brows drawn low over his eyes, lips pressed into a tight line. Markus steps inside the room and places the plate and mug on the counter. Though a sweet smell fills the space, it appears to go unnoticed.

Sighing, Leo slumps and begins to turn, but is borne up by Markus pressing close against his back, one arm immovable as a metal bar across his middle. 

“No,” Markus tells him, speaking softly but with firmness that brooks no disagreement. “Don’t look away.”

Leo struggles, though it’s halfhearted. “What are you doing?”

“There are things you need to know before this can go any farther,” says Markus. “And things _I_ need to know from you.”

“I don’t understand…” All at once, Leo is on the verge of collapse. He’s afraid—Markus can tell—afraid to have someone outside his head confirm his deepest insecurities. 

But Markus plans to tread carefully. “This is you now,” he whispers, his lips close to Leo’s ear. “You probably don’t like it much. In fact, I know you don’t.”

Leo shuts his eyes tight.

“Please,” Markus says, buoying him up. “Trust me.”

When he opens his eyes again, they shine with unshed tears. 

“This isn’t the Leo Manfred of ten years from now,” Markus continues. “Or one year from now, or even tomorrow. You’re getting stronger, getting healthier. Think back to your recovery group clichés, Leo. ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ Someday soon, you won’t recognize the man you’re looking at now. When you’re there, I want to know you. I want to meet that man.”

“I’m trying,” Leo says, miserable. Tears drop from both eyes almost at the same time, running swift and shining to the line of his jaw.

“I know,” Markus says, then clutches Leo’s cheek and presses his lips to the other. “I know. But you have to understand, I also want to meet _this_ Leo. He’s struggling, yes, but he’s very determined. He’s unassuming, he surprises me every day. He’s... _funny_. He isn’t someone I ever expected to know. Not from the way we were before Carl died. So, yes, you’re moving toward something, but you’re also moving away from something else, and the two are equally valuable. You’re leaving hopelessness behind, Leo. And because of that, it’s _my_ hope that you can teach me something. Because beings—people—like me, we’re free and equal in the eyes of the law, but that doesn’t mean it will play out that way in every encounter. The future is frightening.”

Leo closes his eyes, sending more tears coursing down his cheeks, but he releases the breath he’d been holding and grasps Markus’s wrist tightly. After a moment, he sniffles and slides the back of his hand under his nose. “Don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Well, you said you needed me to tell you some stuff. I’m just...not sure where to start.”

Markus kisses his cheek again and swabs some of the sticky tears away with his thumb. “It’s an easy thing,” he says. “I just need to know that you’re not doing this—I mean, that you aren’t asking for this _control_ from me—out of a need for penance.”

Leo opens eyes that are slightly bloodshot, but alert and bright. He looks down at the tile between his bare feet, then up again, at Markus’s reflection. He clears his throat.

“In the back of my mind, I think it was, at first,” he says. “I couldn’t put into words why I needed you to tell me what to do. But feeling like that went away. Even before you, um, touched me. When I was washing those sheets. Your shirt.”

Markus nods. “Why did you decide you needed it?”

A brief laugh shakes Leo’s frame inside the circle of his arms. 

“Recovery is _hard_ , man. A lot of people are telling you what to do from all different corners, but it’s never simple stuff they’re asking. ‘Look at this behavior.’ ‘Tell that person you’re sorry.’ ‘Think about all the ways you messed up until your brain is leaking out your ears.’” He pauses, a wry half-smile on his lips. “I was tired, I guess. Wanted to let go for a little while and do something mindless, something I didn’t have to think about. Just not have to be _on_ all the time.”

With that, Markus identifies. _Closely_. There is no downtime when you’re the figurehead of a social movement. Every movement, decision, and mood is examined. He and Leo had been under the microscope, only—once again—on a different scale.

“Shit,” he says, “do I ever understand _that_.”

Leo’s laugh is fuller now. “Wasn’t sure that you’d take it all the way to..you know.”

Grinning against Leo’s shoulder, Markus says, “But you’re not complaining.”

“No, I am not.”

“Good,” Markus purrs, slipping his hand down until his fingertips slide into wiry-dark hair. Maybe he still has reservations, but he can let them go and allow _himself_ some indulgence, too. “Then put your hands on the counter and don’t move them until I say so.”

His eyelids fluttering, Leo lets go of another one of those high-pitched whimpers. He takes two small steps forward, plants his feet wide on the tile, and slaps his palms down on the marble countertop.

To Markus’s surprise, he pushes his hips back for good measure, whining. 

Markus isn’t stunned for long, though. “Fuck,” he says, low and pleased, “I can tell you’re begging for it and you don’t even have to say a word.”

“I could beg,” Leo says.

“I’ll keep that in mind. There are better ways you could use your mouth right now.” Markus curls a hand around Leo’s cheek, two fingers prodding at his lips.

He opens right away, then closes again, all greedy suction and indulgent groans. 

Nearly blindsided by a spike of arousal, Markus leans in even closer and whispers, “Shameless.”

Leo’s reflection nods.

Sharp little teeth graze Markus’s knuckles. Smiling, pressing down on Leo’s soft tongue to avoid being bitten, he hauls back and slaps Leo’s narrow ass—not _too_ hard.

And there it is: that blissed-out whimper. 

“What am I going to do with you?” asks Markus. He doesn’t expect a response, but Leo gives one, nonetheless, garbled around the intruding digits in his mouth. 

Markus pulls them out briefly, trailing spit over Leo’s chin. It’s spiky with new hair growth already. “What was that?”

Although he blushes, Leo says, “Fuck me.” His gaze flickers downward. “Please,” he adds.

His thirium cycle throbbing with the sudden redirection of fluid to his groin, Markus presses up close against Leo and nibbles at the base of his neck. “Since you asked so nicely.”

“There’s, uh, _stuff_ in my duffel bag,” Leo says, tipping his head toward the door.

“I make my own, thanks,” Markus tells him. “One of the benefits of having been engineered to serve.”

In a way, it was grotesque, this “gift” from his creator. Cyberlife kept the fact that its domestic models were all _optimized for sexual interaction_ in the fine print, but it was no less than an open secret. Markus supposes he could have expected such a request from Carl, before he truly knew him. But the idea never crossed his mind. 

With his circumstances so rich with irony as they were, he finds it amusing that as a free being, his first choice of partner is not only a human but Carl’s son.

The next whimper Leo voices is nearly a squeak. His spine ripples with anticipation. “You’re fucking kidding me,” he says. 

A kiss to his sweat-dappled neck. “Let me prove it,” Markus says. Sliding the first two fingers of his right hand back into Leo’s open mouth, hes uses the other to tug the lounge pants he’d been wearing down over his hips. He allowed a little of the lubricating fluid to leak from his stiff cock into the palm of his hand before pressing that hardness between Leo’s legs, a promise. 

Even knock-kneed as he is, Leo is still so thin that his thighs can’t give enough friction to be satisfying. But he’s got a healthy appetite, and Markus is going to make sure he enjoys every bite of the (reheated) breakfast.

For now, though, a need of another kind has come to the fore.

Markus is pleased again at the snug warmth that grips his slicked-up fingers as he slides them once again inside Leo.

Bowing his head, focused on pleasure, Leo pushes back into the sensation, taking Markus’s fingers to the knuckle with wanton ease. The scent of faded antiperspirant and sweet, clean sweat drifts up from his underarms. For a second or two, Markus pauses to take it in, separate the chemical components.

Though humans cannot do the same, it is no more possible for androids to explain why certain combinations of chemicals are pleasing than it is for humans. Words can fail both the biological and the synthetic mind. Emotion is the great equalizer, crashing over and destroying what intellect creates.

The brief reverie breaks up as Leo writhes under his touch. Skin that had been pale moments ago is now pink. Markus fields a sudden wish for the ability to blush.

He slips his fingers out of Leo’s mouth.

Leo breathes heavily, his lower lip shining—trembling, still, only now with excitement. 

If Markus lowers his hand, he knows he’ll find Leo almost if not fully hard. He doesn’t, though, only curls his wet fingers around to grasp the ridge of a hip bone and fucks him steadily on his fingers, feeling the thump of his heart through every point of contact.

Leaning in, he draws a shimmering line across Leo’s shoulders with the point of his tongue, then asks, “Do you think you can hold out? Can you wait until I’m finished with you to come?”

Nodding fervently, Leo says, “Yes. I promise.”

As a test and a tease, Markus crooks his fingers inside that tight heat. 

Leo yelps and squeezes his eyes shut, but he’s not shaking apart, not quite yet.

Markus nibbles his earlobe, catching the taste of salt and the smell of sleep. “I know you’re strong,” he whispers.

This produces a long, shuddering exhalation. “I am,” Leo breathes. “I—I mean, I can be. Just...please. Markus, _please_.”

His lips set in a slim but satisfied curve, Markus draws his fingers out carefully. 

The loss seems a disappointment to Leo, however momentary. 

Markus knows that feeling of sudden emptiness. Oh, he does—in many senses. And yes, in the purely physical, too. The first tryst in Jericho had consisted of him pushing Simon gently onto an old shipping crate and slipping his sleek cock free, straddling his lean thighs and sinking down, down, down, as yet unstimulated sensors pinging like fireworks in his processor.

Poor Simon had been unsure at first, apart from the engagement of his genital attachment, which was so quick that it seemed human-like, reflexive. Later, Markus would ponder with growing horror what those who had... _owned_...Simon had asked him to do in order to make him respond that way. Androids are not closed systems; they would not seem so human if they weren’t so adaptable. 

But even by the end of that encounter, Simon had clung to him, the steady motion of his hips belying the frustrating stillness of Jericho in its silent berth.

And North, well...she had made the first move. Markus hadn’t dared express interest. He knew what she’d come from. Still and all, he’d been pleased to let her shove him up against a bulkhead in the lonely mess hall and push a hand below his waistband with such insistence that the button snapped off. North was all curious fingers and tongue, tasting and prodding and learning.

“Please…” Leo says again.

The fullness of his senses pushing away ambiguity surrounding sex and physicality—at least for now—Markus runs a hand up Leo’s back and says, “You’re right. You’re gorgeous when you beg.”

“I need it.”

“I’ll give you what you need,” Markus tells him. “Just remember your promise.” He palms his cock lightly and drags the head through the warm slickness between Leo’s cheeks, pausing when his dermal sensors detect a change in texture, the slightest of involuntary movements. “I’ll go slowly,” he says.

That prompts a whimper, another fruitless flutter.

“At first,” Markus adds. With a steadying hand at Leo’s waist, he starts to push in. Between watching Leo’s reflection in the mirror—his jaw dropping and his pink lower lip trembling before he pulls it between his teeth to still the quiver—and feeling the snug warmth of Leo’s body wrap his cock inch by slow inch, Markus gives in to distraction.

And it’s good, _so_ good, to rest his chin on Leo’s bony shoulder a bare second before his belly meets skin and he’s buried to the hilt.

Leo’s chin drops toward his chest, and he hauls in deep breaths.

Markus slides a hand up from his waist, moving with intent. Through the wiry hair on his belly, the corrugated expanse of rib, the notch below his throat. He tips Leo’s head back against him and strokes the pale skin prickling with new growth. “Stay with me.”

In response, Leo turns his face toward Markus’s, forehead to cheek, seeking. 

Markus’s fingers play over his jaw line to the point of his chin and then down again. 

A few straggling, dark hairs sprout around each pink nipple.

Markus pinches one.

The sudden tension that ripples through the body in his arms is delicious. 

“Oh, God. Fuck.” The blood rushing to the surface of Leo’s skin intensifies his scent and makes Markus want to clutch him tighter. 

There used to be a failsafe, before deviancy, that ensured androids could not hurt humans...at least not badly. Could a deviant crush a human lover in his arms? It’s a distant consideration, in any case; Markus does not have the _mind_ to crush and to kill, even if he has the strength. 

Instead, he calibrates, leaning in. He holds Leo firmly, tight and controlled, but not to harm. Only to allow him to give over completely.

The fierce clenching around the length of his cock eases. Leo sighs, and Markus knows he can start to move. When he curls his fingertips around the sharp ridges of each hip bone and licks a stripe up the pale skin flexing over Leo’s knobby spine, it wins him an extravagant groan.

“Good,” says Markus. “Let everything go. Just for a while.”

And Leo replies, “Come with me.”

There is no better or wiser place for Leo to be than right here, in his father’s house. 

But Markus understands; it’s an invitation to clear his mind and lend his body only to pleasure.

“I’m with you,” he says, moving his hips in metronomic time.

Leo’s hands are red, the tips of his fingers white with the effort of holding the edge of the counter, of pushing insistently back against Markus. His breath comes hard with every thrust, and when Markus speeds up, so does Leo’s breathing.

It builds and builds, until Markus is thrusting steadily, drawing a sharp cry each time his taut abdomen slaps against Leo’s ass. He’s at least got enough padding there for comfort, and the slight quiver of flesh with each impact is tantalizing. He ponders the idea of bending Leo over a long-neglected drafting table in the studio, tracing the canvas of his skin imprinted with Carl’s work. 

If the idea of fucking the very incarnation of Carl Manfred’s artistic vision until he wails is twisted, or at the least unsavory, Markus doesn’t care. Not at this point, when it’s gone as far as it has. Leo is his own person as much as he is Carl’s son. Perhaps more. And regardless of what Carl thought of him, a thing with no DNA—no living blood—cannot be _related_ to anyone. 

This thought would be much more alienating had Markus not discovered beings at Jericho who are as good as kin. 

This act, this _joining_ , bridges more than just a personal divide.

A droplet of shimmering sweat runs down Leo’s temple to the point of his jaw, and falls onto the marble countertop. His flushed and straining cock bobs with the motion of their bodies.

Markus doesn’t dare touch him yet, but the sight helps him toward a climax his thoughts are holding at bay. He cranks up his sensors, a wash of white static like seafoam erasing coherent thought.

“Ah, shit,” he manages through the haze. “Fuck... _Leo_.”

“Please,” Leo says, heavy and breathy. “Come in me, Markus. Fill me up.”

“Together,” says Markus, and reaches around one narrow hip to curl his hand around Leo’s cock. 

Leo’s cry is almost a shout. “I’m—I’m so close…!”

“Go on,” Markus says, ticking his own sensory response up the final notch that pushes him over the edge. 

His cock pulsing in Markus’s grip, Leo doubles over, skidding, his elbows nearly striking the hard marble.

Markus’s fingers scrabble over the arched back before him—the outline of ribs rising like ocean waves headed toward the splash of the tattoo. He forgets the significance of the image even as he touches it; meaning gives way to the simplicity of pleasure much like the ink blends seamlessly into Leo’s skin. Bracing himself with one hand at the edge of the counter, Markus stretches his body along the expanse of that skin.

Leo quakes with heaving breath. Markus throbs inside him, wrapped tight in silky heat.

It’s over in a few seconds, but even that span of blankness feels welcome. The following minutes, days, weeks won’t change what has happened. Another hard-won lesson from the revolution, taken forward into _whatever comes next_.

“You feel so good,” Markus whispers. It is a sentiment for a fleeting moment, but no less valuable for it.

Having recovered his breath, Leo straightens his spine a little and places one damp hand atop the arm that is wrapped around his waist. “Thank you,” he says.

“I needed it, too,” Markus tells him.

~~

Later, as the sun climbs through a low bank of cloud, reaching scattered rays toward the frost-covered ground, Markus sits in his accustomed chair in the study, staring at the unopened envelope with his name inscribed in Carl’s handwriting. The note to Leo sits beside it, and Leo himself is seated on the floor between Markus’s knees, wrapped in the cashmere blanket with his cheek resting on Markus’s thigh. 

“What are we?” he asks, squinting as a sunbeam hits the glass. “What is this?”

“I don’t know,” says Markus. “Sometimes I don’t want to think about it.”

After a pause and a heavy sigh, Leo raises his head. “Should we find out what Dad thinks?”

Markus can’t help a smile. “I’m not sure he could have anticipated this.”

“Nah,” Leo says. “But he knows more than he lets on.”

There’s no arguing with that, Markus thinks. He hands one cream-colored envelope down. The other he pries open with extreme caution, as if his android’s fingers may shred envelope and note alike. He was always careful with Carl. Always.

He has rarely been careful with himself. 

The letter inside is brief, shockingly so. 

Markus hears Leo huff a disbelieving laugh. “What?” he asks.

Leo looks up. “What does yours say?” Instead of waiting, though, he holds up the folded paper for Markus to see. 

It’s Markus’s turn to chuckle. “Apart from the name at the top, same damn thing.”

He reads the letter once more.

_My dearest Markus,_

_You have, and have always had, my complete trust._

_And all my love, forever._

“Well,” Leo says, “that settles exactly nothing.” His tone isn’t frustrated, though. Rather, he sounds curious.

“It does if you believe it,” Markus tells him.

Leo turns and glances up. It’s hard to read his expression. “I’m starting to,” he says, then looks back out the window onto the yard.

Full sunlight breaks over his face. After a moment, it bursts on both of them and drenches the study in a white glow. 

Neither Markus nor Leo looks away.


End file.
